I’ve hunted since I was a kid and have owned firearms since I became an adult. I have six guns — a rifle and five shotguns, including a venerable Colt double-barrel that’s been in the family for 140 years.

There’s a generous pleasure in tramping through a Wisconsin woods on a crisp fall day and seeing if, just this once, you might be smarter than a grouse or a deer. A gun is an integral part of the experience.

But guns have to be handled with care. That’s why I didn’t mind the background check when I bought my last shotgun and why I enjoyed taking a hunter’s safety class with my son. Hunter’s safety programs, which were pioneered by the National Rifle Association, have vastly reduced hunting deaths and shooting accidents in Wisconsin.

A lot of gun owners feel like I do — recent polling proves it — and I think a majority of us would like to see more fact and reason and less propaganda and emotion in the gun debate.

A new report on gun policy from the RAND Corp. provides a start. RAND researchers took two years and spent more than $1 million scouring academic journals to evaluate gun policy research. They interviewed dozens of experts on both sides of the gun divide.

RAND, a nonprofit think tank based in California, found solid evidence that laws requiring guns to be safely stored reduce death and injuries among youth. RAND also found that "stand your ground" laws, which allow a person to use deadly force if they believe they are in imminent danger, may increase homicide rates.

RAND also found “moderate” evidence that background checks conducted by gun dealers decrease gun homicides and found somewhat less conclusive evidence that they decrease violent crime and homicides overall.

But for most policy questions involving guns, the evidence is thin as gruel.

Should we ban assault weapons? Hard to tell. Raise the age for firearm purchases? Maybe. Require “smart guns”? Don’t know.

The NRA is the main reason we don't know whether any of these tactics might work. An acquiescent Congress has all but shut down funding for gun violence research and has made tracing crime guns hard to do even for cops.

My guess is that broader use of background checks would prevent some people diagnosed with severe mental illness from acquiring guns, particularly assault-style rifles. But that’s only a guess because Congress wrote the laws that the NRA wanted, such as the 1996 Dickey Amendment and 2003 Tiahrt Amendment, which severely restrict government research on gun violence and data on crime guns.

As a result, we spend far less money studying gun violence, which kills more than 30,000 people in the United States annually, than we do studying sepsis and traffic accidents, which kill about the same number.

I’d also guess that requiring firearm safety courses, like those hunters in Wisconsin have to pass, would reduce shootings and deaths in the general population, as it did among hunters. If we can require people buying hunting permits to have a thorough understanding of firearm safety, we can require it for gun purchases.

Sensible hunters know that the best way to protect gun owners’ rights is to encourage safe and responsible gun use. They have supported hunter safety courses and agreed to limits, including no more than three shells in a shotgun as a way to discourage the overhunting that had harmed migratory bird populations.

There is nothing in the Second Amendment that prevents limits on the number of rounds a firearm can shoot or requiring a special permit for high-capacity magazines. In fact, stringent regulations have been required to own machine guns since 1934, and no machine gun covered under the National Firearms Act has been used in the mass slaughters of recent years — not in Parkland, Fla., (17 dead, 17 wounded), Las Vegas (59 dead, 527 wounded), the small church in Sutherland Springs, Texas (26 dead, 20 wounded) or Sandy Hook Elementary (20 6- and 7-year-old girls and boys dead, along with six teachers).

As a gun owner, I don’t feel my rights are threatened by any of these limits. Polls show many other gun owners feel the same way, no matter what the most virulent and outspoken NRA enthusiasts say.

I also have no fear of learning more. Research would likely tell us what would work best to reduce mass shootings and gun crimes. Since when are Americans afraid of knowledge that leads to solutions?

Universal background checks are supported by 80 percent or more of the public nationwide, including large majorities of gun owners. There is plenty of evidence to justify extending background checks to all sales while funding more research to better understand the mass-shooting problem.

Who is the president working for? Who are members of Congress working for? Who is our governor working for? Our Legislature?

RAND interviewed 95 gun policy experts from across the spectrum as part of its research. “The purpose was not to let the experts' judgments substitute for science but in a fact-free environment, it is advocates and experts who shape public opinion and the opinion of policy-makers,” said Andrew R. Morral, a senior behavioral scientist at RAND who led the “Gun Policy in America” project.

“What they believe is often the ‘truth’ that is used to pass legislation. ... It’s the place where they disagree the most where new science would potentially have the most impact."

RAND is hoping to help create a "shared" set of facts for the public, he said, which would be a major contribution.

I think there is a good chance that expanded background checks, better firearms safety education and strict limits on high-capacity weapons would reduce shooting deaths.

But we need more facts and more reason.

And we need to stop being afraid of where facts and reason lead us.

David D. Haynes is solutions editor for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. Email him at david.haynes@jrn.com.